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    The Writings of Aleister Crowley: The Book of Lies, The Book of the Law, Magick and Cocaine
    The Writings of Aleister Crowley: The Book of Lies, The Book of the Law, Magick and Cocaine
    The Writings of Aleister Crowley: The Book of Lies, The Book of the Law, Magick and Cocaine
    Ebook273 pages3 hours

    The Writings of Aleister Crowley: The Book of Lies, The Book of the Law, Magick and Cocaine

    By Aleister Crowley

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    Included in The Writings of Aleister Crowley are four of Crowley’s seminal works: The Book of Lies, The Book of the Law, Magick and Cocaine. Each title has been newly edited and revised based on the original manuscripts, restoring each work as it was intended to be read by Crowley.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherAnubis Books
    Release dateJul 29, 2018
    ISBN9781387985128
    The Writings of Aleister Crowley: The Book of Lies, The Book of the Law, Magick and Cocaine
    Author

    Aleister Crowley

    Aleister Crowley (1875-1947) was an English poet, painter, occultist, magician, and mountaineer. Born into wealth, he rejected his family’s Christian beliefs and developed a passion for Western esotericism. At Trinity College, Cambridge, Crowley gained a reputation as a poet whose work appeared in such publications as The Granta and Cambridge Magazine. An avid mountaineer, he made the first unguided ascent of the Mönch in the Swiss Alps. Around this time, he first began identifying as bisexual and carried on relationships with prostitutes, which led to his contracting syphilis. In 1897, he briefly dated fellow student Herbert Charles Pollitt, whose unease with Crowley’s esotericism would lead to their breakup. The following year, Crowley joined the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, a secret occult society to which many of the era’s leading artists belonged, including Bram Stoker, W. B. Yeats, Arthur Machen, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Between 1900 and 1903, he traveled to Mexico, India, Japan, and Paris. In these formative years, Crowley studied Hinduism, wrote the poems that would form The Sword of Song (1904), attempted to climb K2, and became acquainted with such artists as Auguste Rodin and W. Somerset Maugham. A 1904 trip to Egypt inspired him to develop Thelema, a philosophical and religious group he would lead for the remainder of his life. He would claim that The Book of the Law (1909), his most important literary work and the central sacred text of Thelema, was delivered to him personally in Cairo by the entity Aiwass. During the First World War, Crowley allegedly worked as a double agent for the British intelligence services while pretending to support the pro-German movement in the United States. The last decades of his life were spent largely in exile due to persecution in the press and by the states of Britain and Italy for his bohemian lifestyle and open bisexuality.

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      The Writings of Aleister Crowley - Aleister Crowley

      Asia

      The Book of Lies

      By Aleister Crowley

      which is also falsely called

      Breaks

      The Wanderings or Falsifications of the One Thought of Frater Perdurabo* which Thought is Itself Untrue

      Liber CCCXXXIII

      *Frater Perdurabo, (literally, ‘Brother Who Endures,’ was the name taken by Crowley during a Golden Dawn ceremony in 1898. (See image following page). The Golden Dawn of Crowley’s era counted many luminaries amongst its occultist members, including literary figures like Algernon Blackwood (1869–1951), Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930) and W. B. Yeats (1865–1939).

      **The Book of Lies was first published by Weiland and Company, London, 1913.

      Image following page: Aleister Crowley during his Golden Dawn Era, 1898-99.

      "Break, break, break

      At the foot of thy stones, O Sea!

      And I would that I could utter

      The thoughts that arise in me!"

      ?

      !

      KEΦAΛH H OYK EΣTI KEΦAΛH

      O!

      THE ANTE PRIMAL TRIAD WHICH IS NOT-GOD.

      Nothing is.

      Nothing Becomes.

      Nothing is not.

      THE FIRST TRIAD WHICH IS GOD I AM.

      I utter The Word.

      I hear The Word.

      THE ABYSS

      The Word is broken up.

      There is Knowledge.

      Knowledge is Relation.

      These fragments are Creation.

      The broken manifests Light.

      THE SECOND TRIAD WHICH IS GOD

      GOD the Father and Mother is concealed in Generation.

      GOD is concealed in the whirling energy of Nature.

      GOD is manifest in gathering: harmony: consideration:

      the Mirror of the Sun and of the Heart.

      THE THIRD TRIAD

      Bearing: preparing.

      Wavering: flowing: flashing.

      Stability: begetting.

      THE TENTH EMANATION

      The world.

      KEΦAΛH A

      The Sabbath of the Goat

      O! THE HEART OF N.O.X. the Night of Pan.

      ΠAN: Duality: Energy: Death.

      Death: Begetting: the supporters of O!

      To beget is to die; to die is to beget.

      Cast the Seed into the Field of Night.

      Life and Death are two names of A.

      Kill thyself.

      Neither of these alone is enough.

      KEΦAΛH B

      The Cry of the Hawk

      HOOR* hath a secret fourfold name: it is Do What Thou Wilt.

      Four Words: Naught-One-Many-All.

      Thou-Child!

      Thy Name is holy.

      Thy Kingdom is come.

      Thy Will is done.

      Here is the Bread.

      Here is the Blood.

      Bring us through Temptation!

      Deliver us from Good and Evil!

      That Mine as Thine be the Crown of the Kingdom, even now.

      ABRAHADABRA.**

      These ten words are four, the Name of the One.

      *Aiwass claimed to be a messenger of the falcon-headed Egyptian god Hoor or Horus (also, Heru-ra-ha and Hoor-Paar-Kraat).

      **Crowley’s variation on abracadabra takes his ‘magick’ away from the more prosaic magic, with all its connotations of trickery and illusion. The ‘H’ in place of the ‘C’ signifies birth and life. Crowley coined the neologism over a decade earlier, in 1901, using kabbala methods.

      Following image: Sun god Horus on papyrus scroll.

      KEΦAΛH Γ

      The Oyster

      THE BROTHERS OF A.’.A.’. are one with the Mother of the Child.

      The Many is as adorable to the One as the One is to the Many. This is the Love of These; creation-parturition is the Bliss of the One; coition-dissolution is the Bliss of the Many.

      The All, thus interwoven of These, is Bliss.

      Naught is beyond Bliss.

      The Man delights in uniting with the Woman; the Woman in parting from the Child.

      The Brothers of A.’.A.’. are Women: the Aspirants to A.’.A.’. are Men.

      KEΦAΛH B

      Peaches

      SOFT AND HOLLOW, HOW thou dost overcome the hard and full!

      It dies, it gives itself; to Thee is the fruit!

      Be thou the Bride; thou shalt be the Mother hereafter.

      To all impressions thus.

      Let them not overcome thee; yet let them breed within thee.

      The least of the impressions, come to its perfection, is Pan.*

      Receive a thousand lovers; thou shalt bear but One Child.

      This child shall be the heir of Fate the Father.

      *Pan, the half-human, half-goat satyr from Greek mythology, is a central figure in Crowley’s cosmology, invoked to represent the dichotomy in man between the bestial and the human, between fecundity and nature, heaven and hell and various other dichotomies. Pan, meaning ‘all’ (as in pantheism), is an appropriate deity-figure for Crowley’s religio-philosophy of inclusion.

      KEΦAΛH E

      The Battle of the Ants

      THAT IS NOT WHICH IS.

      The only Word is Silence.

      The only Meaning of that Word is not.

      Thoughts are false.

      Fatherhood is unity disguised as duality.

      Peace implies war.

      Power implies war.

      Harmony implies war.

      Victory implies war.

      Glory implies war.

      Foundation implies war.

      Alas! for the Kingdom wherein all these are at war.

      KEΦAΛH F

      Caviar*

      THE WORD WAS UTTERED:

      the One exploded into one thousand million worlds.

      Each world contained a thousand million spheres.

      Each sphere contained a thousand million planes.

      Each plane contained a thousand million stars.

      Each star contained a many thousand million things.

      Of these the reasoner took six, and, preening, said:

      This is the One and the All.

      These six the Adept harmonised, and said:

      This is the Heart of the One and the All.

      These six were destroyed by the Master of the Temple;

      and he spake not.

      The Ash thereof was burnt up by the Magus** into The Word.

      Of all this did the Ipsissimus know Nothing.

      *Another loaded word, ‘caviar’ speaks to Crowley’s belonging to (and disdain for) the upper classes of the U.K., while also signifying birth, ad ovum, in its literal meaning (fish eggs).

      **A Magus was originally a priest in Ancient Persia.

      KEΦAΛH Z

      The Dinosaurs

      NONE ARE THEY WHOSE number is Six: else were they six indeed.

      Seven are these Six that live not in the City of the Pyramids, under the Night of Pan.

      There was Lao-tzu.

      There was Siddhartha.

      There was Krishna.

      There was Tahuti.

      There was Mosheh.

      There was Dionysus.

      There was Mahmud.

      But the Seventh men called Perdurabo; for enduring unto The End, at The End was Naught to endure.

      Amen.

      KEΦAΛH H

      Steeped Horsehair

      MIND IS A DISEASE OF semen.

      All that a man is or may be is hidden therein.

      Bodily functions are parts of the machine; silent, unless in dis-ease.

      But mind, never at ease, creaketh ‘I.’

      This I persisteth not, posteth not through generations, changeth momently, finally is dead.

      Therefore is man only himself when lost to himself in The Charioting.

      KEΦAΛH Θ

      The Branks

      BEING IS THE NOUN; Form is the adjective.

      Matter is the Noun; Motion is the Verb.

      Wherefore hath Being clothed itself with Form?

      Wherefore hath Matter manifested itself in Motion?

      Answer not, O silent one! For there is no ‘wherefore,’ no ‘because.’

      The name of that is not known; the Pronoun interprets, that is, misinterprets, It.

      Time and Space are Adverbs.

      Duality begat the Conjunction.

      The Conditioned is Father of the Preposition.

      The Article also marketh Division; but the Interjection is the sound that endeth in the Silence.

      Destroy therefore the Eight Parts of Speech; the Ninth is nigh unto Truth.

      This also must be destroyed before thou enterest into The Silence.

      Aum.

      KEΦAΛH I

      Windlestraws

      THE ABYSS OF HALLUCINATIONS has Law and Reason; but in Truth there is no bond between the Toys of the Gods.

      This Reason and Law is the Bond of the Great Lie.

      Truth! Truth! Truth! crieth the Lord of the Abyss of Hallucinations.

      There is no silence in that Abyss: for all that men call Silence is Its Speech.

      This Abyss is also called ‘Hell,’ and ‘The Many.’ Its name is ‘Consciousness,’ and ‘The Universe,’ among men.

      But that which neither is silent, nor speaks, rejoices therein.

      KEΦAΛH IA

      The Glow-Worm

      CONCERNING THE HOLY Three-in-Naught.

      Nuit, Hadit, Ra-Hoor-Khuit, are only to be understood by the Master of the Temple.

      They are above The Abyss, and contain all contradiction in themselves.

      Below them is a seeming duality of Chaos and Babalon;* these are called Father and Mother, but it is not so. They are called Brother and Sister, but it is not so. They are called Husband and Wife, but it is not so.

      *Not a variant on ‘Babylon,’ but an important goddess in the Thelemic pantheon. Babalon, the ‘Mother of Abominations,’ is also known to Thelemites as the Scarlet Woman. Scholars posit that Crowley was inspired by the Bible’s ‘whore of Babylon,’ a figure Crowley studied.

      Following image: William Blake’s 1809 interpretation of the Whore of Babylon.

      THE REFLECTION OF ALL is Pan: the Night of Pan is the Annihilation of the All.

      Cast down through The Abyss is the Light, the Rosy Cross, the rapture of Union that destroys, that is The Way. The Rosy Cross is the Ambassador of Pan.

      How infinite is the distance from This to That! Yet All is Here and Now. Nor is there any there or Then; for all that is, what is it but a manifestation, that is, a part, that is, a falsehood, of that which is not?

      Yet that which is not neither is nor is not

      That which is!

      Identity is perfect; therefore the Law of Identity is but a lie. For there is no subject, and there is no predicate; nor is there the contradictory of either of these things.

      Holy, Holy, Holy are these Truths that I utter, knowing them to be but falsehoods, broken mirrors, troubled waters; hide me, O our Lady, in Thy Womb! for I may not endure the rapture.

      In this utterance of falsehood upon falsehood, whose contradictories are also false, it seems as if That which I uttered not were true. Blessed, unutterably blessed, is this last of the illusions; let me play the man, and thrust it from me! Amen.

      KEΦAΛH IB

      The Dragon-Flies

      IO IS THE CRY OF THE lower as OI of the higher.

      In figures they are 1001; in letters they are Joy.

      For when all is equilibrated, when all is beheld from without all, there is joy, joy, joy that is but one facet of a diamond, every other facet whereof is more joyful than joy itself.

      KEΦAΛH Γ

      Pilgrim-Talk

      O THOU THAT SETTEST out upon The Path, false is the Phantom that thou seekest. When thou hast it thou shalt know all bitterness, thy teeth fixed in the Sodom-Apple.*

      Thus hast thou been lured along That Path, whose terror else had driven thee far away.

      O thou that stridest upon the middle of The Path, no phantoms mock thee. For the stride's sake thou stridest.

      Thus art thou lured along That Path, whose fascination else had driven thee far away. O thou that drawest toward the End of The Path, effort is no more. Faster and faster dos thou fall; thy weariness is changed into Ineffable Rest.

      For there is not Thou upon That Path: thou hast become The Way.

      *First described by ancient historian Titus Flavius Josephus when he discovered the fruit growing in the wild near Sodom, Calotropis procera or apple of Sodom is used by Milton in place of the Bible’s apple in his version of the Adam and Eve story.

      The Frutage fair to sight, like that which grew

      Neer that bituminous Lake where Sodom flam'd;

      This more delusive, not the touch, but taste

      Deceav'd; they fondly thinking to allay

      Thir appetite with gust, instead of Fruit

      Chewd bitter Ashes.

      – Paradise Lost, Book 10.

      KEΦAΛH IΛ

      Onion-Peelings

      THE UNIVERSE IS THE Practical Joke of the General at the Expense of the Particular, quoth FRATER PERDURABO, and laughed.

      But those disciples nearest to him wept, seeing the Universal Sorrow.

      Those next to them laughed, seeing the Universal Joke.

      Below these certain disciples wept.

      Then certain laughed.

      Others next wept.

      Others next laughed.

      Next others wept.

      Next others laughed.

      Last came those that wept because they could not see the Joke, and those that laughed lest they should be thought not to see the Joke, and thought it safe to act like FRATER PERDURABO.

      But though FRATER PERDURABO laughed openly, He also at the same time wept secretly; and in Himself He neither laughed nor wept.

      Nor did He mean what He said.

      KEΦAΛH IE

      The Gun-Barrel

      MIGHTY AND ERECT IS this Will of mine, this Pyramid of fire whose summit is lost in Heaven. Upon it have I burned the corpse of my desires.

      Mighty and erect is this {Phi-alpha-lambda-lambda-omicron-sigma} of my Will. The seed thereof is That which I have borne within me from Eternity; and it is lost within the Body of Our Lady of the Stars. I am not I; I am but an hollow tube to bring down Fire from Heaven.

      Mighty and marvellous is this Weakness, this Heaven which draweth me into Her Womb, this Dome which hideth, which absorbeth, Me.

      This is The Night wherein I am lost, the Love through which I am no longer I.

      KEΦAΛH IΣ

      The Stag-Beetle

      DEATH IMPLIES CHANGE and individuality if thou be that which hath no person, which is beyond the changing, even beyond changelessness, what hast thou to do with death?

      The bird of individuality is ecstasy; so also is its death.

      In love the individuality is slain; who loves not love?

      Love death therefore, and long eagerly for it.

      Die Daily.

      KEΦAΛH IZ

      The Swan

      THERE IS A SWAN WHOSE name is Ecstasy: it wingeth from the Deserts of the North; it wingeth through the blue; it wingeth over the fields of rice; at its coming they push forth the green.

      In all the Universe this Swan alone is motionless; it seems to move, as the Sun seems to move; such is the weakness of our sight.

      O fool! criest thou?

      Amen. Motion is relative: there is Nothing that is still.

      Against this Swan I shot an arrow; the white breast poured forth blood. Men smote me; then, perceiving that I was but a Pure Fool, they let me pass. Thus and not otherwise I came to the Temple of the Graal.*

      *Graal is the Old French spelling of grail. A grail in black magic symbolizes a cup with magic properties. The Cup of Christ was the object of the knights’ quest in Arthurian myth, a magic chalice that would bring Christ-like rebirth to the

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